Analysis · curated 2 Aug 2026
Agent Sprawl and Context Sprawl: Causes, Risks, Fix [2026]
First reported atlan.com
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Single-source analysis — first reported, latest, and curated coincide.
Why it matters
Agent sprawl patterns like shadow agents, permission creep, and unmonitored delegation chains expand the attack surface of agentic AI deployments, giving defenders governance concepts to inventory and contain ungoverned autonomous agents.
An Atlan explainer, drawing on the arXiv paper 'Governing the Agentic Enterprise' by Vivek Acharya, describes agent and context sprawl in enterprises: the proliferation of redundant, ungoverned, and conflicting AI agents. It proposes a taxonomy of sprawl patterns including shadow agents, orphaned agents, permission creep, and unmonitored delegation chains, and a five-level governance maturity model grounded in NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001.